Philip Glass being interviewed by William Furlong in 1982. From â€œSpeaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversationâ€ by William Furlong (Phaidon Press).

Duncan brought this fascinating New York Times article on William Furlong to my attention yesterday. Duncan was particularly interested in how Furlong’s Audio Arts magazine, which consisted solely of cassette recorded conversations with other artists, provides a precursor to what Bad at Sports is doing in Chicago. A new book, titled “Speaking of Art,” containingÂ edited transcripts of 43 interviews from the archive has just been published by Phaidon Press. From the New York Times article, which was written by Randy Kennedy:

For a couple of decades the lowly plastic cassette tape, full of good sounds, cheaply copied and passed around like samizdat, served as creative raw material mostly in the indie-music world and the college dorm room.

But in London in the early 1970s, a conceptual artist named William Furlong began harnessing the cassette for his unlikely purposes in the visual arts. The motivation wasnâ€™t dauntingly conceptual: he and his friends talked a lot and listened to the conversations of other artists and realized something.

â€œIt became apparent to us,â€ Mr. Furlong said in a telephone interview last week from his home and modest recording studio in the Clapham section of London, â€œthat none of that talk and none of our interests were being met by any traditional arts publications.â€

Phaidon Press has now published â€œSpeaking of Art,â€ a small sampling of the immense undertaking that resulted from that dissatisfaction. Beginning in 1973, with the help of a few collaborators, Mr. Furlong created Audio Arts, a no-budget â€œmagazineâ€ composed solely of cassette recordings of interviews with artists Mr. Furlong found interesting. He mailed them to friends and subscribers, at first hundreds and then thousands.

The critic Mel Gooding, in the bookâ€™s introduction, invokes the provisional title that Joyce used for many years for â€œFinnegans Wakeâ€ â€” â€œWork in Progressâ€ â€” to describe the spirit of Mr. Furlongâ€™s enterprise, noting that another provisional title for Joyceâ€™s novel would have applied just as well to the vast audio archive: â€œHere Comes Everybody.â€

Mr. Furlong considers the magazine a work of art itself: a monumental audio sculpture. Though it has never received much attention in the United States, it has long had an art-world cult following in Europe, and in 2004 its archive, thousands of hours of tape, was acquired by the Tate Britain, which describes it as the most comprehensive collection of artistsâ€™ voices in the world. (The museum has put four hoursâ€™ worth of the archive on its Web site, at tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/audioarts.)